Conspiracy Fact #2751: Your Phone Illegally Listens to Everything You Say and Do.

It's official.

Conspiracy Theorists win again!

Marketing firm admits using your own phone to listen in on your conversations

Your long-held suspicions are confirmed, according to a report: Your phone really is listening to you.

Uh Duh?

Anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade+ knows damn well that governments and corporations have had the ability to listen in on pretty much everything we're doing. Like you'll say some random keyword to a friend in private. Example: "Man I wish I could go RIVER RAFTING this summer." You don't mention RIVER RAFTING to anyone else (and especially not on social media). The next day Facebook would serve you a random targeted ad on your feed for "cheap innertubes".

WOW, WHAT A COINCIDENCE!

What are the odds!?!

A marketing firm whose clients include Facebook and Google has privately admitted that it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and then places ads based on the information that is picked up, according to 404 Media.

An epidemic of trust in a trustless world.

The main problem with this is that the general population refuses to believe that corporations and government illegally spy on them 24/7 without their consent (even in the wake of Snowden and Wikileaks). They prefer to employ a "LALALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING" ostridge head-in-the-sand approach instead. You have no idea how many frustrating conversations I've had with normies on this exact topic. They go something like this:

Can you believe how good Facebook/TikTok algorithms are?
They know exactly what you want without even listening in on your conversations!

No, they are just listening to your conversations.

That can't be true they wouldn't do that and they aren't allowed.

lol, bet?

What should have been an obvious Occam's Razor moment for everyone had turned into anything but. The simplest answer is the correct one: they're listening to your conversations and serving you ads based on that data. So why then, do so many believe that it isn't happening? Well, because the people doing it are denying it of course. Why would they lie?!?

Gaslighting on a systemic scale

On a very real level this is a classic example of how acidemia has been completely captured by the establishment while also pretending to be anti-establishment at the same time. Some midwit with a doctorate degree publishes some nonsense about how it's possible to get targeted information without illegally wiretapping your devices and the mob eats that garbage up like it's candy.

Now when one gets into an argument with a normie about this topic they'll say stupid shit like "SOURCE"?!?! "Do you think you're smarter than this master-thesis?" Spoiler alert: I don't have to be smarter I just have to be less corrupt and less trusting and more skeptical; just like any scientist should be.

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Blatant 4th Amendment violations

The spirit of the 4th Amendment of the United States Constitution is a basic right to privacy. The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it was written so long ago the Founding Fathers could have never dreamed of the marvel that is the Internet, let alone the formation of Big Tech. No one could have ever guessed that corporations would become this powerful in such a way, and then that the government could leverage them behind closed doors to violate all of our rights in secret.

Permissions

When you download an app on your phone you have to give it permission to use certain devices on the phone like the microphone or the camera and whatnot. Maybe an app needs to use the microphone for a very legitimate reason like there being a chatting feature directly on the app. That app isn't supposed to use your microphone for any other purpose, but they totally do because duh data is worth money and these are all digital data companies.

And this assumes that the app even needs your permission in the first place. It would be foolhardy to assume that the creator of the phone or the government that strongarms them would ever need you to consent to surveillance. There's a very definite order to authority here. Some entities need permission and others do not. The higher an entity is up the chain the better they are at hiding their activity. For example law enforcement wouldn't dare use illegally collected information at trial but they'd be able to acquire "legally" collected evidence based on data they should have never had access to in the first place.

For example I watched a documentary recently about a hacker that was committing enormous amounts of tax fraud. He eventually gets caught and realizes that the only way he could have possibly been identified was if the cops had basically wiretapped and hijacked every WIFI signal on a multi-block radius. He decided to represent himself in court (and fired his lawyer) which is crazy.

The government gave him a full pardon because they realized that it was better to let one criminal go than to risk him winning in court and preventing law enforcement from hijacking wifi. Simply the act of going to court shed light on the fact that they were breaking the law. This happened after he had already lost the first case and filed for appeal, so that tells you something right there.

Cox Media Group, the television and radio news conglomerate, admitted in a pitch deck to investors that its “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations,” according to the report.

"Okay so they're doing it now but they weren't doing it before."

Another classic bullshit argument. In this case many will conclude that this type of thing was not possible before recent AI advancement. This is simply not the case. AI is not required it just makes this tech even more advanced.

Twenty years ago I was taking an advanced-level college course on operating systems. The thing I remember most from that class ironically wasn't anything about operating systems, but rather what my professor was working on in her spare time. She was one of the pioneers that invented text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology. I remember thinking, "Wow I wonder if that will go anywhere." Two decades later we see that it is the literal basis of targeted ads and a critical foundation of AI. Nice work, Teach.

Unethical but not Immoral

On a philosophical level it's interesting to consider that a lot of this wrong-action is shady as hell but also isn't hurting anyone most of the time. In fact it may even be preferred to the alternative. Would I rather see an advert of a product I might actually want... or a tampon commercial? I'd rather see the targeted ad, so that's interesting.

LoL someone got fired for spilling the beans.

The slideshow includes claims that Facebook, Google and Amazon are clients of CMG.

This article has been heavily modified since last I read it two weeks ago.
Apparently it got such negative reception that Big Tech has responded in kind:

Google removed CMG from its “Partners Program” website after it was contacted by 404 Media to comment on the matter.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, admitted that it was reviewing CMG to see whether it violated any of its terms of service.

“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.

An Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media that its advertising arm “has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so.”

Yes: THEY ARE ALL LYING.

They all do this.
Obviously.

“We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal?” the company wrote in a since-deleted Cox blog post from November 2023.

“It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page term of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included.”

The "legality" of it is irrelevant.

Putting something in a contract doesn't make it legal. Imagine getting someone to sign away their life into slavery. It doesn't matter. Slavery is illegal and unconstitutional, just like listening in on phone conversations to serve targeted ads. The difference is the stakes are much lower so nobody actually cares enough to do anything about it.

Conclusion

Big Brother is listening;
It's not up for debate.